A Hint of Horse Meat Has a Nation Squirming More Than Its Neighbors

LONDON — Seeking literary echoes of current predicaments, Britons can generally rely on Shakespeare. But one line in the national memory has proved curiously inappropriate.

“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” cries Richard III, facing defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field, in 1485. Yet horses seem to be the last thing Britons want these days, at least in food that is labeled as something else altogether.

For weeks, the land has been seized with a spreading, Europe-wide scandal over discoveries of equine DNA in processed meals sold under household brands packaged as exclusively bovine — spaghetti Bolognese, lasagna and burgers among them. Television documentaries have investigated the phenomenon. Headlines have trumpeted it. Bloggers have blogged. Tweeters have tweeted.

But no one seems able to fully answer the question of why shoppers and diners in Britain are so much more worried about a hint of horse meat than European neighbors in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere who eat their steeds with equanimity.

Soul-searching Britons have invoked factors ranging from an age-old taboo on consuming animals seen as pets, companions or heroes of sport and war, to a sense of one more betrayal in a catalog of broken public trust.

“This is not a horse meat scandal,” said the Rev. Alexander Lucie-Smith, a priest writing in The Catholic Herald. “It is a labeling scandal” that has prompted the question, “Can we trust anything we read on a label?”

Part of the answer lies in recent memory of mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease that shook confidence in the nation’s herds. An academic study even traces the equine aversion to the eighth century, when Pope Gregory III sought to press newly Christianized Anglo-Saxons to abandon their horse-eating, pagan ways.

For some, the brouhaha reflects unease among consumers who feel double-duped, pressed by economic austerity into buying cheap, ready-made meals while the food chain delivering them is manipulated by shadowy, get-rich-quick suppliers, perhaps even criminal gangs. The scandal, moreover, has conjured Britain’s stubborn class distinctions, with those who can afford pricey butchers’ cuts sneering at the masses who cannot.

Horse meat is much cheaper than beef, and investigators have discovered a murky, often unregulated procession of players stretching from Romania to Mexico, with no clear indication of the point at which it enters the mix of meat sold as beef, exploiting an age-old hankering for Britain’s signature hearty food.

As long ago as the 15th century, the Constable of France — according, yes, to Shakespeare, this time in “Henry V” — analyzed the English character thus: “Give them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils.”

Not for nothing did the British earn the French sobriquet “les rosbifs,” betokening an overwhelmingly sniffy Gallic perception of British cuisine.

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The French, it is said, found their own dietary vindication at the Battle of Eylau, in 1807, when, possibly apocryphally, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, the surgeon general of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, ordered starving French troops to eat the flesh of their fallen horses, enshrining the practice of equine epicureanism.

To this day, in an area of Paris that I frequent, the horse-butcher takes her place proudly at the twice-weekly street market alongside vendors of fresh seafood, ripe Brie, roast chicken, foie gras, pâté and fare like Andouillette sausage made of porcine entrails, which seems as alien to some palates as horse meat does to the British.

In other words, food defines identity. As a German professor, Victor B. Meyer-Rochow, told Radio Free Europe, “by saying the horse is such a noble animal and we will not eat this meat, we elevate ourselves above those who treat the horse as if it were just rabbit or something else.”

But there is a much more somber message. In recent years, an unrelenting succession of tawdry scandals has eroded trust in the British press and the BBC, the National Health Service, Parliament and individual politicians. Exposés of the rigging of benchmark interest rates and the mis-selling of financial instruments have compounded the loss of confidence in banks and bankers since the financial crisis of 2008.

Indeed, the former editor Andreas Whittam Smith wrote in The Independent, “The more closely the horse meat scandal is examined, the more it brings to mind the origins of the banking crisis” — for horse meat sold as beef, read subprime mortgages sold as safe investments.

Perhaps what really distinguishes the British, though, has been a crop of horsey and not very funny jokes, suggesting a stoic resignation to yet one more scam that will go unexplained and unpunished, leaving ordinary people little choice but to look for a Monty Pythonesque bright side, and mull the old adage: caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

A sample — and this is one of the better ones: A burger walks into a bar and asks for a drink. “I can’t hear you,” says the barkeep. “Sorry,” replies the burger. “I’m a little bit horse.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 26, 2013, on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Hint of Horse Meat
Has a Nation Squirming
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